Odds and Ends from your tired correspondant

First of all, a bit of birthday follow up. My son wanted a birthday tiara to wear during his celebration. Living as we do, up stairs from a .99 store, fulfilling that request was easy.

I finished decorating the cake.

One thing I have always been fairly strict about as a mom is not buying sugar heavy breakfast cereals. I am always willing to buy a box of the junky cereal of their choice for their birthday. My youngest is born on March 17. He usually requests Lucky Charms. He may have actually reached the point where he finds them gross. The box was done by breakfast on the 18th. My son’s friends ate the cereal with their cake.

I’m also further along on the journey towards Passover.

One batch of meat is done.

Here it is sliced and frozen and ready to warm up for the second night of seder. This is the reduction of pan juices that I will serve over the meat.

This is what is currently cooking in my oven, the meat for the first night in a ground coffee and spice rub and the bones for the seder plate.

One cake I had baked , an apple cardamom almond cake broke as I took it out of the pan. I tossed it in a rectangular pan baked the sloppy mess until it had a crust and then frosted the whole thing with Israeli spreadable chocolate. I cut it into squares and stuck it in the freezer. It tastes sort of like banana bread. On the positive side it does not taste like a Passover cake. On the negative side, it was way too much work to end up tasting like banana bread. I don’t have photos. I’m too angry at the stupid cake to capture it’s image.

This dessert was low in terms of work and high in terms of taste and impact. the are date and cocoa bonbons. it’s dates and almonds whipped up in the food processor with cocoa and figs and some spices. I rolled the bon-bons in a mix of Passover confectioners sugar (potato starch whipped up with sugar in the processor) and unflavored coconut.

I will serve these along with meringues. I like such a high color contrast dessert plate.

The chocolate torte came out perfect ( and tall). My older son and I did a field trip to our local butcher. They were selling a similar but smaller flourless chocolate nut torte for $34.95.

My youngest made matza balls for the first time. He realized that they are actually really easy to make.

I made another potato kugel.

The cooking has been interspersed with laundry and phone calls trying to figure out the next stage of care for my mother. My boys have been helping with everything, except for the eldercare. Actually they have been helping by being really, really nice to me and by washing and drying the endless parade of dirty dishes and pots.

There is more to do but less than there was yesterday.

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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